Billy Sunday. Ellis William T.

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СКАЧАТЬ man said, "Frank Adsitt, you are a fool to treat your mother like that. Kiss her good-bye." I jerked from him and turned back. I heard the conductor call "All aboard." I heard the bell on the engine ring and the train started out, and I heard my mother cry, "Oh, Frank, if you won't kiss me good-bye, for God's sake turn and look at me!"

      "'Mr. Sunday, when the train on the Burlington Railroad pulled out of Denver, I stood with my back to my mother. That's been nine years ago and I have never seen nor heard from her.'

      "I led him to Jesus. I got him a position in the old Exposition building on the lake front. He gave me the money he didn't need for board and washing. I kept his money for months. He came to me one day and asked for it.

      "He used to come to the noon meetings every day. Finally I missed him, and I didn't see him again until in June, 1893, during the World's Fair he walked into the Y. M. C. A. I said, 'Why, Frank, how do you do?'

      "He said, 'How do you know me?'

      "I said, 'I have never forgotten you; how is your mother?'

      "He smiled, then his face quickly changed to sadness, and he said, 'She is across the street in the Brevoort House. I am taking her to California to fill her last days with sunshine.'

      "Three months later, out in Pasadena, she called him to her bedside, drew him down, kissed him, and said, 'Good-bye; I can die happy because I know my boy is a Christian.'"

The Gambler

      "I have reached down into the slime, and have been privileged to help tens of thousands out of the mire of sin – and I believe that most of them will be saved, too. I've helped men in all walks of life. When I was in Chicago I helped a man and got him a position, and so was able to restore him to his wife and children. One night a fellow came to me and told me that the man was playing faro bank down on Clark Street. I said: 'Why that can hardly be – I took dinner with him only a few hours ago.'

      "But my informant had told me the truth, so I put on my coat and went down LaSalle Street and past the New York Life Building and along up the stairway to the gambling room. I went past the big doorkeeper, and I found a lot of men in there, playing keno and faro bank and roulette and stud and draw poker. I saw my man there, just playing a hand. In a moment he walked over to the bar and ordered a Rhine wine and seltzer.

      [Illustration: The Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago, where Billy Sunday was Converted.]

      "I walked over and touched him on the shoulder, and he looked and turned pale. I said, 'Come out of this. Come with me.' He said, 'Here's my money,' and pulled $144 from his pocket and handed it to me. 'I don't want your money.' He refused at first, and it was one o'clock in the morning before I got him away from there. I took him home and talked to him, then I sent down into Ohio for an old uncle of his, for he had forged notes amounting to $2,000 or so, and we had to get him out of trouble. We got him all fixed up and we got him a job selling relief maps, and he made $5,000 a year.

      "I didn't hear from him for a long time; then one day Jailor Whitman called me up and told me that Tom Barrett, an old ball player I knew well, wanted me to come up and see a man who had been sentenced to the penitentiary. I went down to the jail and the prisoner was my friend. I asked him what was the matter, and he said that he and some other fellows had framed up a plan to stick up a jewelry store. He was caught and the others got away. He wouldn't snitch, and so he was going down to Joliet on an indeterminate sentence of from one to fourteen years. He said: 'You are the only man that will help me. Will you do it?'

      "I said: 'I won't help you, I won't spend so much as a postage stamp on you if you are going to play me dirt again!' He promised to do better as soon as he got out, and I wrote a letter to my friend, Andy Russell, chairman of the board of pardons. He took up the case and we got my friend's sentence cut down to a maximum of five years.

      "Time passed again, and one day he came in dressed fit to kill. He had on an $80 overcoat, a $50 suit, a $4 necktie, a pair of patent leather shoes that cost $15, shirt buttons as big as hickory nuts and diamond cuff buttons. He walked up to my desk in the Y. M. C. A. and pulled out a roll of bills. There were a lot of them – yellow fellows. I noticed that there was one for $500. There was over $4,500 in the roll. He said: 'I won it last night at faro bank.' He asked me to go out to dinner with him and I went. We had everything on the bill of fare, from soup to nuts, and the check was $7.60 apiece for two suppers. I've never had such a dinner since.

      "We talked things over. He said he was making money hand over fist – that he could make more in a week than I could in a year. I was working at the Y. M. C. A. for $83 a month, and then not getting it, and baseball managers were making me tempting offers of good money to go back into the game at $500 to $1,000 a month to finish the season. But I wouldn't do it. Nobody called me a grafter then. 'Well,' I said to my friend, 'old man, you may have more at the end of the year than I've got – maybe I won't have carfare – but I'll be ahead of you.'

      "Where is he now? Down at Joliet, where there is a big walled institution and where the stripes on your clothes run crossways."

A Living Testimony

      "I had a friend who was a brilliant young fellow. He covered the Chino-Japanese war for a New York paper. He was on his way home when he was shipwrecked, and the captain and he were on an island living on roots for a week and then they signaled a steamer and got started home. He got word from the New York Tribune and they told him to go to Frisco, so he went, and they told him to come across the arid country and write up the prospects of irrigation. And as he walked across those plains, he thought of how they would blossom if they were only irrigated. Then he thought of how his life was like that desert, with nothing in it but waste.

      "He got to Chicago and got a job on the Times and lost it on account of drunkenness, and couldn't get another on account of having no recommendation. So he walked out one winter night and took his reporter's book, addressed it to his father, and wrote something like this: 'I've made a miserable failure of this life. I've disgraced you and sent mother to a premature grave. If you care to look for me you'll find my body in the Chicago River.' He tossed aside the book and it fell on the snow.

      "He leaped to the rail of the bridge, but a policeman who had been watching him sprang and caught him. He begged him to let him leap, but the policeman wouldn't do it and got his story from him. Then the policeman said, 'Well, I don't know whether you're stringing me or not, but if half of what you say is true you can make a big thing out of life. I'm not much on religion, but I'll show you a place where they will keep you,' and he took him to the Pacific Garden Mission at 100 East Van Buren Street, which for 13,000 nights has had its doors open every night.

      "He went in and sat down by a bum. He read some of the mottos, like 'When did you write to mother last?' and they began to work on him and he asked the bum what graft they got out of this. The bum flared right up and said there was no graft, that Mrs. Clark had just mortgaged her home for $3,000 to pay back rent. Then he told him he could sleep right there and go down in the morning and get something to eat free, and if he could not land a bed by next night he could come back to one of the benches. Then my friend got up and told him the story of Jesus Christ, and the young man went down and accepted Christ. He was so full of gold bromide cures that he tingled when he talked and he jingled when he walked.

      "He started out to give his testimony and he was a marvelous power. I met him some time later in an elevator in Chicago, and he was dressed to kill with a silk lid and a big diamond and the latest cut Prince Albert, and he said, 'Bill, that was a great day for me. I started out with not enough clothes to make a tail for a kite or a pad for a crutch and now look at me.' He was secretary in the firm of Morgan & Wright, and was drawing $175 a month. He is an expert stenographer. A newspaper in New York had written him to take an associate editorship, but I told him not to do it, to stay where he was and tell his story."

      The next class in the University of Experience which Sunday entered was СКАЧАТЬ